“The pats, milk, cuddles, kind words, and the occasional kick in the pants when I needed it from the people of Mt Lawley over the last decade have helped me grow.”

“Living and working in the electorate of Mount Lawley, I have come to appreciate many of the issues affecting the local community” said Bazil Cat.

“I will be taking my campaign directly to the people, beginning with a listening tour” said Mr Cat.

“With no party affiliation my contribution to parliament will directly reflect the opinion of my constituents.  I will not be asked to paw a party line.” said Mr Cat.

“Standing for Mount Lawley is a decision to which I have given a great deal of thought, but I have been encouraged by my friends to throw my collar into the ring” said Bazil Cat.

• breaking his tail,
• losing sight in both eyes,
• suffering bubble ear,
• being hit by three cars, and
• having nasty infections resulting in abscesses.

Glad to see something like this is finally on the market, I hope they get some push from mobile phone carriers to pick up the software and bundle it with their existing packages.

The report saying that Australians download more TV than other countries probably points more to the fact that Australian TV doesn't care as much about it's subscribers, they move TV shows around randomly and don't start on time which makes recording them in other ways difficult. The Australian TV industry seems to have gone out of it's way to make watching TV shows actually on TV in Australia difficult so people are opting for other mechanisms. This should really be seen as a warning to the Australian TV companies to pull their socks up and make the experience better for consumers or they will continue to lose to the internet downloading of shows.

A tip when making Meringue is to use a teaspoon of vinegar (or lemon juice, something acidic) in the meringue mixture, it makes it a little tangier and works a lot better.  Just a small amount of lemon juice can work really well with a lemon meringue pie.

I find cleaning the mixer with vinegar before I start mixing the egg whites helps as well, makes the whites a little fluffier and a bit stiffer.

The more worrying part of the article is labours claim that when elected it will require all ISPs to implement filtering. This is not a realistic expectation and is also problematic, how do you define filtering? Who defines what is what and if it should be filtered? No filters are perfect, new sites come up all the time with new content and they may not be filtered by the system yet. Vista does try and do some automatic detection of the page but it is definitely not 100% accurate and doesn't look inside images. If labour does implement this once they get into office it will create a lot of problems for Australia's ISP industry, although a better idea of how it is going to implemented would be needed for a more indepth comment.

I was watching Bill Moyer's journal today and they were talking about islamic fundamentalism in Europe and how is creating some problems.  Like for example this case in the German courts where a judge let a woman stay in an abusive relationship because the Quoran apparently allows for husbands to beat their wives.  British police estimate that there are six honor killings a year in the UK, at least they are being prosecuted for murder there when they are found out.  There is also a rise of this sort of thing in German courts, where a brother got 9 years in jail for murdering his sister.  How could you murder your sister?  I find that something that is just amazing, someone you grew up with for most of your life and that you are close to, no matter what else happened.  What is happening to the world?  Why is there this sudden rise in fundamentalism, both in christianity (US) and Islam (just about everywhere else)?

Even in Jordan, which is one of the less radical of the middle east states, a person got away completely scott free after murding his sister.  I find it hard to fathom from there sorts of things how anyone can claim that Islam does not have serious problems in terms of it's treatment of women.  The claim that the Quoran is similar to the old testimate in what it claioms and it's position against women is true, however no where in the world are the rules from the old testimate applied in absolute forms.  Jews and christians have both moved forward on this sort of issue and have not followed the lines which say women should be stoned for various crimes or any of ther other things along this line in the old testimate.

It is interesting watching the american coverage of the spree shooting at Virginia Tech, comparing it to what I remember of of the Port Arthur massacre in Australia.  In Australia as soon as the event happened there was a push for tighter gun controls for making guns harder to come by.  The american reaction seems to be exactly the opposite, trying to say that if all the people in the room were armed then the incident wouldn't have been as bad.  It is an interesting take on the situation, the difference seems to be the position on how to deal with such problems.  In the Australian situation it seems that the reaction was to make sure it was hard to do by making the availability of the things needed to do a spree killing harder to come by.  The american idea seems to be to make the spree killing less likely to be as bad by making everyone armed so they can shoot back.

To me the american reaction seems a little short sighted.  It would tend to end up turning into a huge armed conflict I would think with everyone shooting at everyone.  Could end up being worse rather than better.  Of course the Australian solution wouldn't work in the US because there are so many guns in this country already it would be impossible to make any sort of major change to the gun laws effective.

I just accepted a position to work at Google up in Kirkland, so still in Seattle.  I will be starting there on the 30th of April, so not long now.  My first week will be down in Mountain View doing a orientation thingy.  So those people down in San Francisco, be nice to meet up again.

I think this will be a good change and a fun job, I was a little peeved without how Microsoft dealt with the team I was on, I did the parental controls feature of vista which has got some of the best airplay/talk about of any of the features associated with vista.  In response Microsoft reorged us first into a group that hated us and then into a group that had nothing to do with Parental Controls and broke the whole team up.  I liked working with the old group of people and I liked the feature, I don't like where I am now or the product I am working on.

Hopefully I will end up working on the Google TV product, which would be fun.

This is an amazing new thing, some doctors have figured out a way to convert different types of blood to o type blood.  This is an amazing thing, it should stop shortages of various types of blood since o positive is a generic type of blood that anyone can use as a transfusion.  This is a wonderful and quite impressive leap forward in medical technology.